ABSTRACT
The word 'savage' derives, as Francis Parkman and Henry David Thoreau both knew, from the Latin silva; it contains in its etymology a key to the significance of the American Indian for both writers. Bouquet's march was an historical fact, not a literary invention. To Parkman, the Highlander's blood-lust is one of many indications that the line between savagery and civilization is a shifting one. By the time he wrote The Jesuits in North America, Parkman knew more about the Iroquois than he had when working on The Conspiracy. Parkman's prejudices were those of the highly privileged 'nursling of civilization' who belonged to the Brahmin caste of early nineteenth-century Boston. Parkman's eyes were already troubling him in the winter of 1845-6 while he worked with furious intensity on the history of Pontiac's conspiracy. Parkman's introduction to his Pioneers of France in the New World, his next book after The Conspiracy, begins as if to follow the Bancroft pattern.
